awesome-hez/playbook.md

The Polkadot Playbook

The minimum set of information you need to be able to explain Polkadot to others.

What is Polkadot?

• Polkadot is a scaling solution for Web3¹ applications and services.
• Polkadot scales through data and execution sharding, allowing for parallelized throughput.²
• Polkadot provides shared security and interoperability to services build on it.³
• Polkadot creates abundant, flexible, and high quality blockspace.⁴
• Polkadot uses a novel "cynical" rollup to provide fast finality while using minimal resources.⁵

What unique things can you do on Polkadot?

• Build applications which execute automatically (without initial user input).
• Build applications with full control over block construction and transaction execution.
• Build applications which dynamically scale up and down execution cores.
• Build applications which execute at sub-second speeds.⁶
• Build applications where end-users pay no transaction fees.

Why choose Polkadot?

• Billions of dollars of economic security provided to itself and applications running on it.
• Fast finalization times, on average under 30 seconds.
  • Compare that to optimistic rollups which may take up to a week!
  • Block production is separated from finality, reducing network stalls.⁷
• Executing and scaling on standard "gaming" hardware.⁸
  • Compared to expensive and centralized machines needed for vertical scaling or ZK provers.
• 50+ active roll-ups building ⁹
  • Many projects outside of Polkadot also use the Polkadot SDK.¹⁰
• Secure cross-chain interoperability with a native bridging protocol.
• Trustless bridges to other blockchain ecosystems.¹¹

Where is Polkadot leading?

• Among the highest Nakamoto coefficients in the blockchain ecosystem.¹²
• 2nd largest developer community after Ethereum.¹³
• Blazing fast execution speeds compared to other blockchain VMs.¹⁴
• One of the largest functioning DAOs, managing tens of millions of dollars in assets.¹⁵

---

1. https://gavwood.com/dappsweb3.html, https://gavofyork.medium.com/why-we-need-web-3-0-5da4f2bf95ab ↩︎

2. https://polkadot.com/blog/polkadot-v1-0-sharding-and-economic-security ↩︎

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKQOSPfM-W0 ↩︎

4. https://www.rob.tech/blog/polkadot-blockspace-over-blockchains/ ↩︎

5. https://x.com/rphmeier/status/1807884271157187007 ↩︎

6. https://twitter.com/bkchr/status/1818027282688352591 ↩︎

7. https://polkadot.com/blog/polkadot-consensus-part-1-introduction ↩︎

8. https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/maintain-guides-how-to-validate-polkadot#requirements ↩︎

9. https://polkadot.subscan.io/parachain ↩︎

10. https://www.availproject.org/, https://midnight.network/, https://entropy.xyz/ ↩︎

11. https://polkadot.com/blog/the-landscape-of-trustless-bridges-on-polkadot ↩︎

12. https://nakaflow.io/ ↩︎

13. https://twitter.com/Polkadot/status/1577016988697706496, https://github.com/electric-capital/crypto-ecosystems ↩︎

14. https://github.com/koute/polkavm/blob/master/BENCHMARKS.md ↩︎

15. https://polkadot.subscan.io/account/13UVJyLnbVp9RBZYFwFGyDvVd1y27Tt8tkntv6Q7JVPhFsTB, https://polkadot.com/platform/dao ↩︎